Researchers looking into how social media posts are reflecting how people use the language

Researchers at Cambridge University are looking into comment as people have posted in Welsh about every day trivia and news on Twitter.

They‘re building a database to see how people’s use of the language is changing – and they’ve already started identifying trends in North Wales.

Dr David Willis from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics who is leading the research, said he wants to capture changes as they take place in everyday life – from buzz words such as ‘sweet’ to tags such as ‘innit’?

He said Tweets are useful because they provide an authentic snapshot of spoken language. He said: “With Twitter I can get a rough and ready answer in 30 minutes as people tweet much as they speak,” he said, adding: “My focus is on the structure or grammar of sentences – and my long-term aim is to produce a syntactic atlas of Welsh dialects that will add to our understanding of the language and influences on it.”

Changes found so far include differences between those who learnt Welsh in the home – who are more likely to say the equivalent of ‘did someone come to the meeting?’ and ‘I didn’t see no-one’, and those who learnt it at school – who are more likely to say ‘did anyone come to the meeting?’ and ‘I didn’t see anyone’. One example of multiple negatives reveals a shift in meaning of the Welsh word for refuse: ‘cau’. “We knew that people in the north used the word ‘cau’ to mean ‘won’t’, saying the equivalent of ‘the door refuses to open’ for ‘the door won’t open’,” said Dr Willis.

Negative concord – such as saying ‘I haven’t not seen no-one’ for ‘I haven’t seen anyone’ – is a strong feature of Welsh. The researchers say they’ve identified two groups in North Wales: one that still says ‘the door refuses to open’ and the other that have begun to say ‘the door doesn’t refuse to open’.

GIS mapping is used to plot where interviewees were brought up.

The research has revealed that, while Welsh does not vary much by social class, there are differences in the Welsh spoken by those who learn it as their first language in the home and those who are first exposed in nursery or school.

Dr Willis said: “Those who acquire Welsh once they reach school are more likely to use English sentence constructions, which differ significantly from the constructions used by those who acquired Welsh at home.”

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Mark Thomas

Liverpool-born Mark joined the Daily Post in January 2014 after seven years as editor of its Merseyside sister title the Liverpool Post. He started out as a weekly news reporter on Wirral Newspapers, and spent seven years at the Daily Post and Liverpool Echo. He was The Press Association's regional correspondent for North Wales, Merseyside and Cheshire from 1983 to 1997, before returning to the ECHO as deputy news editor. He has won a number of journalism awards, including the UK Press Gazzette Regional Reporter of the Year award, and in 1993 wrote a book on the James Bulger murder.